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Monday, July 21, 2014

2,219: To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild

During this centenary year of the outbreak
of World War One, I’ve been reading a number of books about the War and its
causes. One of these, Adam Hochschild’s To End all Wars approaches the subject
of this terrible event from a slightly different angle to most. As is clear from the following quote,
Hochschild’s sympathies are clear:

“"If we were allowed to magically roll back
history to the start of the 20th century and undo one – and only one – event,
is there any doubt that it would be the war that broke out in 1914?

To Hochschild, an historian of a pacifist
inclination, World War One was an unnecessary folly, from which no good but an
inordinate amount of evil came. His book
tells this story, and the story of the War, by focusing on those who stood up
to protest against the War or who refused to participate. The book’s subtitle is “How the First World
War Divided Britain” and the author attempts to demonstrate this be contrasting
the stories of dissenters with those of willing participants and supporters of the
War.

Fascinatingly, many of the individuals he
features were linked together by ties of family or friendship. One of the book’s villains, Sir John French,
commander of the BEF was, to Hochschild’s mind, a snobbish incompetent, calmly
throwing away the lives of thousands of ordinary soldiers in misconceived
attacks. Yet his sister, Charlotte
Despard, a suffragette and socialist activist, was a bitter opponent of the War,
forming the Women’s Peace Crusade. What
is even more amazing is that the two siblings remained close and affectionate
throughout the War, only becoming estranged when French, as Commander in Chief,
Home Forces, suppressed the Easter Rising, much to the disgust of Despard, a
SinnFein member.

Another tortured family relationship explored
by Hochschild was that of the Pankhurst sisters, all leaders in the suffragette
movement. Whereas Emmeline and
Christabel Pankhurst believed that the German aggression was a threat to all
humanity and felt that cooperating with the Government might also help their
cause after the War, Sylvia and Adela, Emmeline’s other daughters took the
polar opposite view. The family became irretrievably
fractured.

But Hochschild also explores other,
lesser-known dissenters, such as the bizarre story of Alice Wheeldon, a
committed pacifist and second-hand clothes dealer in Derby. A forceful anti-war campaigner and a
harbourer of draft-dodgers, she, together with two other family members, was
convicted of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, an
accusation that was, almost certainly, trumped up by Government agents.

Hochschild reinforces his message with the
grim and, even now, nearly incomprehensible statistics of death and
destruction. To give just some examples,
he points out that half of all Frenchmen aged between 20 and 32 at the outbreak
of war were dead by Armistice Day in 1918, that 9 million soldiers died and 21
million were wounded (including one of my great-grandfathers) and that nearly a
million soldiers from Britain and its Empire perished. One of the most shocking comments he makes is
that:

"If the British dead alone were to rise up and
march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more
than two and a half days."

To End
All Wars is written with a passion and, indeed,
compassion, that makes it intensely moving and a pleasure to read. As a history of the War, it must be said that
it doesn’t add a huge amount to the forest of First World War histories on the
market but its account of British dissent during the War is a valuable
additional to the general literature.

The main issue I have with it though is
that it doesn’t really reflect the truth.
Although the dissenters and objectors were impassioned and brave and,
although a case can be made (albeit not a conclusive one) that they were,
ultimately, correct, they didn’t truly divide Britain.

One of the standard narratives of the War,
influenced probably by the ubiquity of the likes of Owen, Sassoon and Graves on
British school syllabuses, is that of an initially enthusiastic country
becoming more and more disillusioned and hostile to the War as the casualties
mounted and the horrors of the trenches became known. But, nevertheless, the country and the army
held together until the end. There was
no serious risk of giving up; Hochschild’s sub-title simply isn’t borne out by
the facts. The dissenters may well have had
a case but they had very little substantive impact.

Despite this flaw, To End All Wars is a worthwhile read. It may give undue prominence to the anti-War
movements but it reminds us of the suffering caused by War and the global
tragedy of a generation cut down in its prime.

About Me

Lawyer, husband, father, voracious reader. During a mild bout of mid-life angst, I found out that, based on life expectancy of a British male and my average reading speed, I have only 2,606 more books to read before I expire. So I'm going to count them down and write about them.
As part of this plan, I intend to read the 1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, using the 2008 edition as my base.